Religions and Empires
Religions and Empires
Empire and Religion – Who Drives Whom?
The relation between Empire and Religion is not a natural partnership. Alexander the Great and Caesar had no interests in proliferating their home pantheon. The movement of Gods across their empires was on the one hand a result of cross-identification of local deities, and on the other hand a result of the movement of people and their culture. Both impacts were important in the Hellenization and early Romanization process.
The empires of prophetic or messianic salvation religions are different; these are Christian Rome, to a certain extent Mazdaic Sasanian Iran, and the Islamic Empire. These religions have a theology and the promise of salvation, far beyond the well being of an urban cult-community. The religions came with a network, and different forms of organization of the community which invigorated an old empire in crisis (Rome) or came along with its expansion (Islam). The Sasanian Empire might be in the middle, since it took over the older Parthian one.
Not only the organizational force of a salvation religion makes it attractive for any imperial polity, adopting it or founded with it, but also its power to bestow legitimacy to the imperial state and its rulers, be it Augusti, Shahanshahs, or the caliphs. Vice versa, the organized religion gains support in its power over the minds of people.
The two lectures explore the movements of the messianic and salvatic promise of religion in the political world of late Antiquity in their Roman, Sasanian and early Islamic dimension.
Mazdean Dreams of Revived Empire? by Garth Fowden (University of Cambridge)
Around the year 930 Mardavij ibn Ziyar, Daylamite Mazdean by birth and condottiere by trade, convinced himself he was a reincarnation of Solomon destined to revive the Mazdean-Sasanid Empire overrun by the barbarous Arabs three centuries before, and restore the palace of the Khosrows at Ctesiphon. Mardavij marched on Baghdad, only to be cut down by his Turkish soldiery. At much the same period, Mazdean scholars in Baghdad were recording for posterity how Khosrow I had sent emissaries to India and Greece, charged with reassembling the Avestan sciences dispersed by the barbarous Macedonian Eskandar when he burned Persepolis. In that way, the full spectrum of human wisdom had been restored under the auspices of Zarathustra. Taken together, these two well-known facts pique one’s curiosity about how Iran’s Mazdean population, still substantial in the early tenth century, envisaged the all too obviously imminent post-Abbasid era. By 1010 when the Shahname burst upon the world, a Muslim poet who craved recognition and reward might depute to a predecessor the delicate task of explaining Zarathustra’s teachings (the Daqiqi insert), and even soft-pedal the Qur’anic worldview, but throw restraint to the winds in glorifying the Sasanids. Thereby, Ferdowsi encapsulated the humanist ethos of the Persianate Millennium inaugurated by his Samanid patrons, and proclaimed justice rather than piety to be the ideal ruler’s principal virtue.
Garth Fowden (University of Cambridge) spent most of his career at the National Research Foundation in Athens, and its concluding years as the first holder of the Sultan Qaboos Chair of Abrahamic Faiths in the University of Cambridge. In his retirement on the volcanic island of Nisyros in the Aegean, he is writing a large-scale history of the Afro-Eurasian First Millennium with a misleadingly simple Fragestellung: Whence Islam?
Inter-Imperial Rivalry and the End of Time: Byzantine, Spanish Umayyad, and Abbasid Relations in the Ninth Century by Hayrettin Yücesoy (Washington University in St. Louis)
In the shifting currents of the pre-modern Mediterranean, where empires rose and fell and beliefs in divine destiny intertwined with political ambitions, a remarkable tale of diplomacy unfolded in the ninth century. This story begins with two powerful rulers: Theophilus, the Byzantine emperor, and Abd al-Rahman II, the Spanish Umayyad amir. Their empires, vast and influential, were connected not only by their opposition to a common enemy but also by shared anxieties rooted in messianic and millenarian beliefs.
Theophilus, facing threats from the Abbasids in Baghdad and the pirates that prowled the Mediterranean, sought allies beyond his immediate sphere. To this end, he dispatched in 839 Qartiyus the Greek—known in Arabic as al-Rumi—a trusted envoy, to the splendid court of Abd al-Rahman II in Cordova. Qartiyus carried with him a proposal that wove together pleas for cooperation against a common enemy with the subtle art of Byzantine diplomacy.
At the heart of the emperor’s letter lay a bold and calculated vision: an alliance against a shared foe that would strike at the vulnerabilities of their mutual rival. Theophilus made his message clear to Abd al-Rahman II: together, they could stem the tide of chaos in the Mediterranean and challenge Abbasid dominance.
The response came in 840. Abd al-Rahman sent his own emissaries to Constantinople: the celebrated poet Yahya b. Hakam al-Ghazal, whose verses were as sharp as his wit, and Yahya Sahib al-Munayqila, an astrologer famed for his ability to unlock the secrets of the heavens. The amir’s reply, penned with the elegant strokes of a master scribe, was cordial yet cautious. He acknowledged Theophilus’s overtures with grace but refrained from making any firm commitments.
Among the most intriguing elements of their correspondence was the invocation of prophetic visions and divine timing. The letters brimmed with references to an imminent millennium—a fateful turning point that, according to prophecy, would mark the downfall of the Abbasids. For Abd al-Rahman, this moment was not just a matter of political strategy but one of sacred destiny: an opportunity ordained by God to restore the Umayyads to their rightful place as rulers of lands they once commanded. Yet, while Abd al-Rahman shared the emperor’s belief in the inevitability of the downfall of the Abbasids, he saw no need to hasten its arrival. Instead, he trusted in the unfolding of fate, content to let the tides of fortune decide the moment of reckoning.
Hayrettin Yücesoy (Washington University in St. Louis): Trained as a historian, I work on the premodern history of the Middle East, focusing on the Abbasid Empire (750-1258 C.E.). My publications engage in debates about empire, political messianism, visions of social order, secularity, inter-imperial connections, and the politics of cross-cultural encounters. My most recent monograph, Disenchanting the Caliphate: The Secular Discipline of Power in Abbasid Political Thought, was published by Columbia University Press in 2023. On Good Governance: Two Discourses of Politics in Early Islam, which provides a critical Arabic edition and annotated English translation of two pioneering political tracts composed for the Abbasid caliphs in the mid-eighth century, is forthcoming in fall 2025. I am also writing a monograph on “Republican” political discourses in medieval Islam.